Abstract
Scholarly and policy debates concerning the contributions of memory to political transitions often examine whether memorials contribute to democratic practices, reinforce partisan divides, or depend on the distinct processes and aims of any given memorial endeavor. All three positions rest on the assumption that stakeholder intentions govern the social and political meanings asserted through memorial practices. Another story emerges if one begins with material objects, human remains. Following the story of skeletal remains from Ethiopia’s Red Terror, this essay argues that objects demonstrate how intentions slip and fail to adhere. In so doing, objects provide a lesson in the limits of memorial politics.
Introduction
The dead figure heavily during periods of political upheaval. Private losses cannot be separated from public mathematics, as casualty counts invariably become the currency for assessing advantage. Whether political violence ends resolutely or slowly declines like dimming embers, its conclusion can be measured in the shift whereby the constant threat of death lifts. The fate of the living begins to separate from that of the dying. With this line drawn, a new material exigency takes hold in relation to the dead and a question emerges regarding human remains or their absence, in the case of the missing. Who will determine how the dead matter?
At every stage of this transformational process, there are multiple, overlapping, and irreconcilable claims to the right to determine a response. To a large extent, the socio-political meaning—the lessons drawn from past violence—of atrocities depends on agendas developed by various stakeholders. These include victim groups, judicial authorities, political leaders, civil society groups, and international actors. But there is a remainder—determinants of memorial impact that reside outside of the various agenda-setting exercises.
One way to sift through this remainder is to follow the path of objects. There is a rich tradition in memory studies of treating objects as anchors of meaning, while around them swirl the shifting forces of time, social, and political change (Huyssen, 2016). But the solidity of the object, its material and thing-ly character, also functions as a site of slippage—where intentions fail to hold fast. In this essay, I trace the thingness of the object and how it provides friction with the gloss of meanings projected unto memorialization of atrocities. I do so by focusing on one of the most complex memorial “objects,” human remains.
I examine interwoven and oft-conflicting claims to determine the meaning of human remains in the context of one under-studied example, the Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The Red Terror occurred in 1976–1978, following the 1974 overthrow of Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie. A military regime, known as the Derg, took power, and set out to destroy the political opposition. Decades later, after the military defeat of the Derg by the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), civil society actors bonded together to create the museum, which opened in 2010.
In the whirl of arguments about memorial meanings, it is easy to get swayed by the force of intentions contending to determine the social and political meaning of human remains. But, along the path of the person becoming body, body becoming remains, remains becoming evidence, and evidence becoming museum artifact, one can glimpse the process through which bones refuse to faithfully convey memorial intentions. Bones on display present a fundamentally material encounter that simultaneously reflects and deflects intentions. They take shape as a narrative slippage point.
This essay begins by introducing today’s debates about the socio-political roles played by atrocities memorial endeavors. It then switches to the context of the Red Terror and the process of becoming object—that is, the final days of one person’s life and efforts by political opposition, the state and family, to determine how a life will matter. The process of becoming an “object” of political violence sets the stage for how something enters a post-conflict setting. Bones are then re-cast into new frameworks as evidence, martyr (in the Ethiopian case), and, eventually, memorial artifact. Once on display, yet other agendas emerge, including unanticipated ones as visitors encounter the objects. Rather than suggesting the need for a new theory of the political value of memory, this material path shows how the object moves through various frameworks for assessing its meaning, with no set of intentions effectively stabilizing its place in understanding the past. Instead, objects help us track the slippage of meaning in endeavors to memorialize atrocities.
Debating memory
Memorialization of violence has a complex lineage far more expansive in forms, purposes, and intentions than the pigeonhole place it is afforded within transitional justice as symbolic reparations. Nonetheless, debating the meaning of memorialization of mass atrocities has gained new salience today in the context of larger debates about the socio-political impacts of transitional justice policies. 1 The international transitional justice project gained steam in the 1990s, marked by the multiplying number of international, hybrid, and national courts instituted, truth processes undertaken, and—always a bit of an outlier—memorial structures unveiled. Decades into this work, analyses at the country-level and cross-country research suggest highly contextualized and overall ambiguous outcomes in terms of the socio-political impact on countries exiting periods of violence or authoritarianism. 2
Within these debates, three positions dominate. First, memorials to atrocities are rights-affirming and democratizing. Second, memorials fan the flames of inter-group tensions and reinforce the power of partisan politics. Third, the socio-political impact of a memorial project is dependent on the process through which it is created. All sides of this debate focus on the intentions at the outset of a memorial project. Below each is briefly discussed in relation to memorial museums.
In the first grouping are memory advocates who have argued that memorialization, notably museums, can support democracy, justice, and reconciliation through crafting of a common narrative, truth-telling, serving as a form of reparation for victims, and coming to grips with the past (Barsalou and Baxter, 2007; Bickford and Sodaro, 2010; Brett et al., 2007). Memorialization efforts have been lauded for how they signal change to the populace, assigning social value to the losses suffered by survivors and families of victims by heralding that abuses have been exiled to the display case or archives (Brett et al., 2007; Wagner, 2008). In so doing, states articulate a moral posture in a memorial lexicon that is increasingly globalized and advocated for by international actors (Bickford and Sodaro, 2010; Levy and Sznaider, 2006). These arguments postulate that memory of large-scale violence can be harnessed to and contained within a normatively defined political agenda of democratization and transitioning a state away from authoritarianism or conflict.
This approach to crafting meaning about the past through memorialization asserts that sparking identification with victims whose experiences of violence will be interpreted as an ethical imperative against human rights abuses (Sodaro, 2018: 175). This is what Marianne Hirsch (2013) described as “post-memory”: experiential, affective, personal storytelling—often called “witnessing.” Memorial museums invite visitors to become vehicles of memories of atrocities they did not experience. Eyewitness testimony, artifacts, and an exhibition’s narrative structure forge a cautionary tale of the continuum between unchecked power, prejudice, and exterminatory violence. Historical trauma is converted into a set of lessons to guide everyday life, at one end of the spectrum, or as exemplar of the exceptional, alerting visitors to the potential for catastrophe. In this model, past atrocities act as a constant beacon exposing the historical and ethical shallows that lead to violence.
Creating institutions and structures designed to permanently recall historic brutalities can also produce nostalgia, feed grievance, reify social divisions, and reinforce power inequalities (Nora, 1989; Rieff, 2017; Verdery, 1999). Among the latest in this line of critique, David Rieff, for instance, argued that within national discourses, memory can be uncompromising and vengeful, distorting state-building into a battleground for victimhood. Rather than inoculating new generations against the abuses of the past, memorialization de-politicizes and sacralizes discussions about governance that properly belong to the realm of compromise and debate (Rieff, 2017). Within local-level dynamics, as Kris Brown has argued, commemorative processes can function as constituency-building exercises on the post-conflict landscape, enabling leaders to reinforce their hold on local populations by marking territory even after violence fades (Brown, 2019). These critical analyses helpfully reinsert power relations into discussion of memory and highlight how emotional narratives can be instrumentalized.
Even while successfully sparking empathy, victim narratives can close down discussion in ways that obscure historical nuance and the structures of power that produced violence and continue thereafter. Susanne Buckley-Zistel makes this argument in her analysis of Hohenschönhausen, a memorial museum that documents state repression under the German Democratic Republic where survivors of violence are the tour guides. She argues that the victim status of the guides “commands respect and awe, or at least empathy, compassion and sympathy in a sense combining authenticity, aura, authority, acknowledgement and vividness” (Buckley-Zistel, 2014: 108–109). However, she continues, the survivors’ stories do not invite conversation and dialogue about the past, but rather serve to limit views of the past (Buckley-Zistel, 2014: 120). Likewise, Amy Sodaro argues that the oft-stated intention of memorial museums is to act as “bulwarks of democratic values and to symbolize a commitment to nonviolence, tolerance, and peace” (Sodaro, 2018: 183), but they cannot escape the political context in which they were created. In short, they remain locked in time, reinforcing power relations rather than providing grips for democratic openings. In the end, she continues, memorialization, “despite all the good intentions, continues to support and sustain the dominant narratives of the past as delineated by the existing powers that be and their priorities” (Sodaro, 2018: 183).
One might well counter that the challenges described earlier are a problem of process that can be reformed. This position argues that memorialization can make a positive impact on emergent democratic processes, when attention is paid to sequencing of various memory projects (Naidu, 2006), the process of memorialization (on its own, apart from any particular outcome or form, Hamber et al., 2010), and how projects engage local actors (Brett et al., 2007: 2; Gready and Robins, 2014).
3
The key factors, Kerry Whigham has argued, are whether contributing to democracy is clearly expressed as a goal, and if projects are open to multiple voices and perspectives (Whigham, 2017). For example, rather than privileging memory as a vehicle for a common abstracted identity or state narrative, memorialization can support a non-hierarchical, multi-perspectival, cosmopolitan presentation of the past (Rothberg, 2009). Similarly, Kris Brown (2019) has called for “critical-inclusive commemoration” which he describes as, a form of relating to the past which seeks to provide a pluralistic space for engagement whilst combining it with a measure of critical inquiry and reflection, informed by evidence and a more “historical” method. The pluralising and critical aspects work to support one another, as a mixture of voices provides a mixture of interpretations; multiple interpretations may better allow a role for debate and evaluation, rather than the automatic delivery of fixed, familiar narratives. (p. 65)
Process-focused analyses offer a more nuanced approach, by positing that memory projects have the potential to contribute to democratizing politics, but the precise form, process, intentions, and context will determine the character of their political contribution. The implication is that memorialization gains meaning through procedures that can be calibrated by memorial actors to determine desired outcomes. The crucial factor is the extent to which memorial projects can be isolated from political, social, or other distortions.
Regardless if one views memorialization as democratizing force, a politically instrumentalized tool or a process-determined social endeavor, all three positions are limited by analytical frameworks based on the premise that the socio-political meaning of memorialization is circumscribed by the intentions of key stakeholders at the onset of a project. Intentions are highly significant, but difficult to capture in an analysis that aims to diagnose or prognose the socio-political value of a memorial museum, with the unending flow of contestations and multiple intentions that mark every memorial project. Furthermore, these complications are compounded with the addition of new factors—many of which might be described as non-memorial 4 —as memorial museums are encountered by different groups over time.
To account for this remainder—the place held outside of intentions—we need a descriptive model of memorial logic that can include how intentions fail to adhere, opening space for the assignation of different “lessons” from the past. This model, I argue, is best arrived at through a story of objects.
Object lessons
Objects have long been a major theme in the theorization of memory (Huyssen, 2016). They have been framed as foundational to and interwoven with the construction of subjectivity; in relation to and escaping from the commodification of the past; and as counterpoint to an increasingly digitized experience of the world. Across these approaches, the memorial object is studied for how it embodies or invokes a memorial intention.
I adopt a radically material view of the significance of memorial objects, as things that are central to memorial processes, but which fail to perform their intended roles faithfully. This approach begins with a new materialist approach to memorial objects. A starting point is Bruno Latour’s description of an “actant”: “something that acts or to which activity is granted by others. It implies no special motivation of human individual actors, nor of humans in general” (Latour, 1996: 373). But to take seriously the proposal of agency without intention, one cannot allow the object to ghost into position as vehicle for confirming memorial meaning. A relentlessly material pursuit of the object unhinges any normative proposals about the meaning of past atrocities, be they democratizing, reifying differences, or processed-bound. The point is to pay attention to non-subjective, material actants, and how their very materiality takes shape as the locus of contesting intentions and—because no set of intentions successfully finalizes the memorial story—a site where intentions slip. Given the mix of agents and intentions at play in constructing and (re)constructing memorial meanings over time, no aims are achieved without “a drift, a slippage, a displacement, which, depending on the case, may be tiny or infinitely large” (Latour, 1999: 88). Memorial objects provide a surface through which the remainder becomes visible.
The objects examined herein are exceptional: human remains. Human bones are more-than-objects, given their embeddedness in complex, on-going human relationships. As Cara Krmpotich, Joost Fontein, and John Harries reflected, “It is difficult, if not counter-productive, to separate out the agency accrued from the material properties of human bone and that accrued from bones as part of human beings” (Krmpotich et al., 2010: 373). Thus, studying memorialization through the path of bones requires walking a tightrope between how one addresses the materiality of bones versus the profoundly human attachments that precede and extend long after a person has become skeleton. Bones function as extreme memorial objects, drawing into sharp relief the issues I want to examine, but also illustrating traits that can be found in other memorial objects. Fully developing this argument is beyond the scope of this essay; for now, bones will be approached in their distinctions.
Even so, I wish to avoid the pitfalls of approaching skeletal remains through an animist or ontological lens, a temptation of all work on memorial objects. In shifting focus from testimony or witnessing of the victim as a key memorial contributor toward the nonintentional agency of material objects, there is a risk of re-attaching the normative assumptions of the former to the latter. As Andreas Huyssen (2016) has warned, those who seek to analyze the role of objects in memorial discourses would do well to avoid positing an “essence of things.” He suggested that “at stake is genealogy, not ontology” (Huyssen, 2016: 108). Heeding that advice, this analysis switches to the process of becoming a memorial object in a specific historical context: Ethiopia’s Red Terror and how bones found a place in a memorial museum.
Becoming a memorial object
The human body does not begin transformation into an object only upon death. Objectification plays a role in contentious battles between unequally powered actors to determine the meaning of a life.
The meaning of a life
On 29 April 1977, Amha, a 17-year-old boy, 5 joined with thousands of other young Ethiopians who took to the streets of Addis Ababa for a massive May Day protest against the country’s military regime (Conley, 2019: 91–94). They were part of the youth wing of a clandestine political opposition that knew it had no means to protect the students from the military’s predictably violent response. But the strength of the opposition was measured by how many people it could summon into the street, and so it continued to summon its young adherents despite knowledge that the response would be brutal. High school students and other young people marched in Addis Ababa, Gondar, Nazareth, Dessie, Debre Markos, among other towns. They demanded that the military regime, known as the Derg and led by Mengistu Haile Mariam, transition to a civilian government.
The Derg rose to power following the 1974 revolution that overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie. While the revolution mobilized broad segments of the population, it also opened the door for the military to seize control of the state. Violence increased as Mengistu consolidated his control first within the military regime, then through systematic assaults against the organized political opposition. This was the “Red Terror,” which peaked in 1976–1978. Arrests, torture, and murder of a generation of young political activists spread with increasing brutality, concentrated in major towns and cities. At the height of the Terror, the military regime would boast its power over life and death; bodies were often left in the street, displayed as warning signs of what happened to those who resisted (Metekia, 2018).
The 1977 May Day student protesters were unarmed, but the regime, which had uncovered their plans, met them with force. Having infiltrated the political opposition, the Derg was aware of and well-prepared for the protests (Zewde, 2009: 27; Tola, 1989: 141–142). As young people took to the streets, they were met with the force of kebele (neighborhood security organizations) and military officials.
At least 1000 youth (Tola, 1989: 143) in Addis alone, including Amha, never returned home. A city-wide curfew that was enforced with lethal means, delayed Amha’s mother’s attempts to claim him back from the deadly political battles into familial authority. 6 The next day, she found him alive in a prison at a local police station, but officers refused to release him. The following morning came with rumors that the imprisoned young protesters had been massacred and their bodies were at Menelik Hospital. His mother, grandfather, and brother ran to the hospital to try to find more information and to search for any sign of Amha.
Eventually, they discovered his body among the dead. Deep in sorrow, they left to search for a coffin. When they returned to the hospital, they put his remains into the coffin. The state intervened again; demanding that the families of the dead pay 100 birr 7 as reimbursement for the bullets used to kill their children (Zewde, 2009: 28). Amha’s family paid but was still prevented from taking his body away. The regime decided that rather than return the children’s bodies to their families, it would hide the human evidence of the massacre in clandestine mass graves. Throughout Addis Ababa, as one witness described, the wailing of mothers who could not find and bury their dead children echoed through neighborhoods (Teffera, 2012: 242–243).
The pain of loss did not dissipate with time. Amha’s sister, Nunu Tsige, explained, “In our family, my mother lost one son. But she only lived until 67 when many others have lived much longer, and she died early because of the loss of that son.” Nunu continued, although her brother died over 40 years ago by the time I spoke with her, “it still feels like yesterday” (Tsige, interview, 2016). The military regime’s state-imposed prohibition on mourning victims of the Terror amplified loss for those who felt closest to it. The subsequent years of silence also created enormous gaps between those who knew and those who were not told about the past.
In the context of political violence, a clash of claims contends to determine who has the authority to ask others to risk death for a cause, to inflict lethal violence, and to dominate the mourning process. As Amha took his final breath, his body was already entrapped in the battles of wills to determine the meaning of his life. In burying his body in a clandestine mass grave, the state multiplied the investments of meaning in material recovery of Amha’s remains and the thousands who died under similar circumstances. As Layla Renshaw (2010) has argued in relation to remains of Republican dead from the Spanish civil war, the absence of social recognition compounds the predicament of uncertainty for families who do not have a body to bury. The absent body becomes a locus of a longing for a material object, love for the missing person, and lack of social recognition for the political violence suffered. For those who remained riveted by such a loss, “the absence of certainty surrounding the victims’ status can in fact make them more potently present” (Renshaw, 2010: 48). Perhaps, this is why memorialization is held in such esteem by families and victims across geographic and social contexts of violence (Kiza et al., 2006): they desperately seek public recognition of the profound absence they suffer.
The challenges in many cases cannot be resolved by returning the remains of people killed in political violence to a familial “plot,” nor frequently is this what surviving family members desire. An injustice of state invariably invokes the desire for a remedy of state, especially in the era of transitional justice.
Transitioning the dead
For Amha’s family and thousands like them, there was no possibility to search for the missing bodies of their loved ones while the Derg remained in power. With mourning itself outlawed, the Derg, like brutal regimes elsewhere, attempted to place the dead “beyond the reach of care” (Rosenblatt, 2015: 165).
Nearly a decade and a half passed before families could return to their search for remains. In 1991, Mengistu’s regime was defeated by the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), a coalition of armed opposition groups organized around an idea of “nation” (ethnicity) and led by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). As Mengistu fled the country, in Addis Ababa and other towns, families flooded to mass graves sites, hidden away in corners of the urban landscape. Together, they embarked on impromptu exhumations. No longer searching for a son or a body, they sought to unearth skeletal remains.
Among those searching was Amha’s sister, Nunu. She would later become a key leader in the effort to create a memorial museum dedicated to the Red Terror. She had spent the years of the military regime in London, returning to Ethiopia only after Mengistu was overthrown. Nunu joined mourners who for the first time felt free enough to search suspected mass grave sites for the remains of their loved ones. Some people were able to find and identify bodies, but many others—including Nunu’s family—were unsuccessful.
Exhuming mass graves does not resolve the conundrum of how to close the door on past violence; it introduces new complications. In Ethiopia, once unearthed, the remains posed an acute challenge. It was not always clear to whom these bones belonged. They eluded the familial resolution. Nor, given that the victims could have hailed from a number of religious communities, Ethiopian Orthodox, other Christian faiths or Islam, was any single traditional religious treatment of the remains possible.
Furthermore, new contexts emerged; the dead as evidence and as political martyrs. Unlike other periods of history when a family might be left with their own devices, by 1991, a new international impetus was gaining ground: transitional justice. Alongside, integrated into transitional justice—and the focus of this discussion—was a “forensic turn” of human rights that changed the paradigm governing treatment of the dead from mass atrocities (Dzuiban, 2017). Now, exhumed human remains would become “evidence” of criminal acts. On this horizon, Ethiopia played an early role, and one that illustrates some limitations of transitional justice assumptions, including how one might theorize the intersection of international and national discourses that govern human remains.
In the international imaginary of transitional justice, the victim is the central figure. 8 However, “the victim” is a constructed category, and not a homogeneous or comprehensive collective of individual agents. The “victim” functions as an ethical concept that is mediated through particular professional practices, be they educational, legal, or activist, and which privilege discrete types of victims and agents who speak in their name (McEvoy and McConnachie, 2013) and which are often defined through state-sanctioned, bureaucratic, and performative practices (Krystalli, 2019). In the case of deceased victims, all sorts of claims are made about what they “want.” In the legal arena, the dead could become evidence of the crimes that they suffered through forensic investigations.
The application of forensic practices to mass atrocities began in Argentina following the defeat of the military junta in 1983, as Abuelas (grandmothers) invited international assistance in efforts to identify the remains of their loved ones with the hope of discovering evidence of grandchildren who might still be alive (Rosenblatt, 2015: 1–5). This request eventually sparked the creation of a new organization, the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense, EAAF) that would lead the way for exhumations in support of international criminal prosecutions in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, and Kosovo (Rosenblatt, 2015). The technologies and practices would also be applied to older periods of atrocities, including the Spanish civil war, Holocaust-related sites, and in searches for American soldiers who were missing in action in Viet Nam, and so forth (Dzuiban, 2017). Over time, the increasingly internationalized forensic paradigm became characterized not only by a set of technical or ethical protocols for treatment of the dead, but also by how it transformed the application of law, the expectations of mourners, and the imagination of the public for whom transitional justice is performed (Keenan and Weizman, 2012).
Oft-forgotten from this history is one of the earliest applications of forensic exhumations to legal proceedings: EAAF’s work in Ethiopia to uncover remains from the Red Terror which began in 1993. The EAAF was invited to support Ethiopia’s trials of former Derg officials, what was once described in The Washington Post as “the most comprehensive examination of human rights abuses since Nazi war criminals were put in the dock at Nuremberg, German in 1945–1947” (Parmelee, 1994). Between 1994 and 2010, several thousand people were prosecuted. The EAAF conducted exhumations of a handful of mass grave sites identified by the Office of the Special Prosecutor based on information about the people who were buried there. Members of the team also presented the remains in Court and testified about them in several hearings (1994–1998). According to the EAAF, the Ethiopian trials were the “first time that physical evidence from forensic anthropology and archaeology was displayed in a local courtroom” (Equipo Argentino de Antropologia Forense, 2002: 66).
There is a common forensic trope that bones “provide testimony”—assigning agency to them. Such assertions frame the dead as providing “unmediated access to past events and reflect an empiricist faith in the ability” of the facts of the body to speak for themselves (Crossland, 2009: 75). However, forensic speech not only interprets, it (re)frames the bones within a highly specified and circumscribed vocabulary. The bones could be presented as evidence, but only in the language of scientific abstraction. The language used to convert bones into evidence is only spoken by a few, as is illustrated in the case of the testimony provided by an EAAF expert in the Ethiopian court: Dried cutaneous tissue was tightly adherent to the inner margins of some of the ligature loops. When removed from the ligature, these skin fragments revealed deep impressions of the nylon cordage, providing evidence that great force was used in applying and knotting the ligatures. Twelve skeletons showed perimortem blunt force injuries ranging from simple nasal fractures to complete fractures of the bones of the extremities. Most likely, these were inflicted in attempts to subdue or restrain the victims at the time of execution. (Equipo Argentino de Antropologia Forense, 2002: 72)
Forensics was not the language of the Ethiopian state or families of the dead—nor was “victim” the primary identifier of their status. The “victim” of transitional justice may have been the central actor in the courtroom; but on the country’s new political stage, the dead who mattered were deemed “martyrs.” A “victim” is one who has been harmed in a breach of the civil contract between individuals and state actors, the labeling as such frequently asserts innocence—someone who did nothing to invoke violence. A “martyr” is one who sacrificed their life for a cause.
Martyr was the primary name for those who were killed in the effort to overthrow Ethiopian’s military regime and the signifier of political relevance. Between 1995 and 2009, three “martyrs” memorial museums were created in the capital cities of the three largest Ethiopian ethnic groups (and to the exclusion of numerous “other” peoples) and the ones most influential in the military effort to overthrow the Derg (Conley, 2019: 98–109). This included in Mekele, the Tigray Martyrs Memorial Museum and Monument; in Bahir Dar, the Amhara People’s Memorial Monument; and in Adama, the incomplete Oromo People’s Monument. Those killed during the Red Terror did not fit the new Ethiopian political dispensation. They were primarily targeted as members of a political opposition that was not organized by nation and which was completely defeated early in the effort to rid the country of the military regime. As “victims,” the social and political relevance of the skeletal remains was foreclosed; they had to become “martyrs.”
The bones of those killed during the Red Terror, once exhumed, became objects of significant investment, but of ambiguous meaning. Only some could be identified and hence, returned to a familial realm. Many never made this transition and they had no proper place in any given ethnic or religious grounds. Others gained status in the new international judicial paradigm as adopted in the Ethiopian practice: they became evidence. But if they were to retain socio-political status, the remains had to be re-cast again within the dominant political discourse of the time, as martyrs to the cause of overthrowing Mengistu.
On public display
As the trials concluded, some skeletal remains ended up under the control of the Association of Red Terror Survivors, Families and Friends, of which Nunu was a member. The bones presented a challenge: what to do with them? As Nunu explained, the Association attempted to answer this question through secular memorialization—in the form of the Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum (RTMMM). In this manner, the losses could become relevant again, by borrowing the dominant political discourse of martyrdom and carving out a space to include these exhumed remains that had no other proper final resting place.
No institution as complex as a permanent memorial museum is created by one person alone. The Association grew in numbers and as the museum project gained momentum, the numbers of people affiliated with it increased in parallel. The group had many debates about the scope, scale, and form of the memorial undertaking. But throughout, Nunu remained the key figure in making the museum possible. It took years before the museum project could move forward, but when memorial activists began to break ground to begin construction of the building, Nunu managed to have the bones transported 4 km from a holding place near Sidist Kilo, to the museum’s construction site at Meskel Square, in what she called a “state funeral” (Tsige, interview, 2017). She hired a horse-drawn carriage to ceremoniously deliver the coffins to Meksel Square, where they were stored inside a temporary structure while the museum was built around them. “They deserved that much,” she said.
For Nunu, a central purpose of the museum was to serve as a final resting place for the skeletal remains that had no names and a memorial location for the names without remains. But this profoundly personal rationale resonated with other aims: the museum would be public, it would honor not only the private losses experienced by families and loved ones, but also—and resonating in Nunu’s narrative, echoing a state funeral—it would pay tribute to the fact that the victims of Red Terror died in political violence as part of a contentious struggle to shape the Ethiopian state. 9 They, like those who died in the ultimately successful military overthrow of the military regime, would be treated as martyrs.
But here was the twist; at the RTMMM, a different lesson would be instilled. Red Terror martyrs do not testify to the logic of the EPRDF-led state (even if they corroborated the righteousness of overthrowing the military regime). In the vision of the Association, the museum, and especially the memorialization of the dead, would instill a lesson that never again should Ethiopians kill each other over political disputes.
What can be learned from bones?
Once displayed, objects invoke memorial meanings by finding their place within an exhibition narrative, while simultaneously blocking meaning, nudging narratives aside, and knocking intentions off balance.
At the RTMMM, the bones of people killed during the Red Terror are displayed in two tall vitrines, each of which has several shelves. One vitrine is organized by the bone parts: skulls in one area, femurs in another, and so forth. In a separate vitrine divided into equally sized boxes, the remains are organized by a single, identified person. Tucked against the glass, is a small photo or the name of the person killed. Included with the skeletal remains are small personal objects and remnants of green cord, used to tether hands behind backs or coiled around a neck.
According to the museum’s visitation statistics, in the first year it opened, in 2010, the RTMMM attracted nearly 70,000 visitors. 10 Attendance has since leveled out to an average of 35,000 visitors a year. The museum’s visitor data categorize visitors into Ethiopian, students (as a subset of “Ethiopian”) and international, with the overwhelming majority (ranging from 86% in 2010, to 68% in 2015) of visitors classified as “Ethiopian.” All of the guides at the museum survived torture and years in prison during the Red Terror. In interviews, the museum guides explained trends in their experiences with the visitors. 11 Many of the Ethiopian adult visitors are old enough to have their own memories of the revolution and, overall, most are sympathetic to the museum’s presentation. However, some of these visitors argue with the guides, saying that they should have cooperated with the government and not fought against it, or they advance the Derg’s justifications that the regime did what it had to do during a period of instability.
Younger Ethiopians, identified as “students,” often know little of the history. While the period of Mengistu’s regime is taught in school, the official curriculum includes few details about the Red Terror and older family members often do not talk about the events. The number of students is a small, but fairly stable proportion of the overall visitation. Unlike in American or European contexts, in Ethiopia, schools do not regularly include museum visits in the curriculum, so this is not surprising.
The third group is international visitors, most of whom know nothing of the history and arrive because a tourist book or city guide recommended the museum. Their numbers have increased over time, initially composing 6% and rising to 28% of total visitors by 2015.
To gain a sense of how visitors view their tour experience, I, with the help of two research assistants, 12 analyzed 751 visitor comments left in the museum’s comment books over the years since it opened. The museum has two visitor books: one intended for Ethiopians and one for international visitors. The below analysis draws exhaustively on comments left in the Ethiopian book, and selectively from the international one.
Visitor comments are a limited, but compelling source for understanding the visitor experience. A researcher cannot craft questions or probe further, but must simply rely on what visitors volunteered to write as the tour concluded. The comments books at the RTMMM, as in most museums, are positioned at the end of the tour, near the exit and a donation box. Sometimes, docents point them out, but not always, and otherwise, there is no prompt outside of the physical presence of books that invites visitors to leave a comment. The books are on view inside the museum and visitors can read through others’ comments if they wish to do so, and some comments reflected a conversation between one visitor and others’ remarks on the same page. The books provide space for name, home city or country—and most visitors include them—and comment.
Only a few visitors explicitly mentioned the display of bones and their comments reflect divergent views. Two argued that the display of human remains was an injustice to the dead and, even more, unnecessary because other evidence would have been enough:
What I have seen is quite disturbing and useless. What is the point of digging out the remains of these victims and displaying them in a museum? The history of these victims could have been told through different means.
I don’t think displaying the remains of the victims to the public is right. It degrades human dignity because other evidence could have sufficed to explain the extent of the atrocities. Besides, displaying the remains hurts the feeling of the visitors. So, I think the responsible body should rethink about it. Overall, the museum is useful to show the history of our country to the future generation.
A pair of comments that appeared one immediately after the other in the Amharic book, points to the profoundly personal stakes of the human remains for a select group of visitors, family members of those who died:
I am happy to see my husband, [name redacted] who is buried here. Today our daughter [name redacted] had the chance to visit her father’s graveyard because he was buried in this museum with dignity. We thank the employees of the museum, guards for keeping this museum with respect and giving us the explanations during our tour. This work will pass to generations, and it should be encouraged.
Although I don’t know my father while he was alive, I am proud to see his remains kept in this museum with respect and dignity. I grew up hearing from many people that my father was a good person. I am glad to see the museum. I am thankful to God to see the demise of the brutal Derg regime and be able to see this museum stand. I hope Mengistu and his accomplices pay the price.
A third set focuses on the bones as museum artifacts that required conservation (i.e. attention to the material preservation of the object itself) and displays techniques:
Take care of their remains. Where did Lucy [indecipherable] go?
13
While it is good to have the museum, it would be good if the remains of martyrs and other stuff is clean.
Good to see the museum is in excellent condition. However, it would be good if the remains of the victims are placed in the lit area. Thank you.
These profound objects are thus viewed as a subversion of the sacred, an honor bestowed on a loved one, or as memorial objects that require attention to their material conditions. Other terms employed in more of the comments and that might suggest reflection on the bones included sacrifice (30), souls (48), victims (29), and martyrs (52). Interestingly, the term “evidence” only appeared five times, but in four usages, visitors indicated that the “evidence” was incomplete; there was not enough, evidence was too partial against the Derg, or (as noted earlier) the bones should not have been used as evidence when other materials would suffice. To use the term “evidence,” it appears, is to introduce doubt.
The handful of comments directly related to the bones can be better understood in the broader context of museum visitors’ responses. The two most commonly expressed sentiments in the comments are gratitude for the museum’s work and expression of its core ethos of “never again.” The vast majority of comments imply that visitors found the museum experience powerful and it prompted them to deeper reflection. However, visitors channeled their reflections into multiple frameworks with none capturing a majority of visitors’ responses.
In total, 17% of visitors framed their museum experience in religious framework, and the same number processed their visit in national terms. Comments reflected both emotional (14%) and educational (9%) responses. The most commonly cited emotion was sadness. Another widely expressed view of the tour concerned survivors and victims. This category can be further subdivided into messages of honoring the dead (13%), engagement with survivors (7%), or on-going injustices against survivors or families of the dead (0.4%).
Visitors touched on the political implications of the exhibition in smaller numbers and presented an array of incompatible political positions: 7.5% of the comments expressly blamed the Derg and Mengistu, 6% addressed the EPRDF government for its human rights abuses, 3.7% embraced the EPRDF for changes it brought about after defeating the Derg, and a very small number—1.2%—expressed their allegiance to the Derg. Among the latter category was one virulently hateful comment that raises a warning flag given the broader social and political demonization of Tigrayan people following the dissolution of the EPRDF government in 2019 (Ezega News, 2019), and war against Tigray (began 4 November 2020):
It honestly would have been great if the Derg wiped out all Tigrayans. There is no significant and small enemy. The future generation should have the mentality of Nazi Germany. Communism for life. Above anyone and anything Ethiopia first! Amen.
Criticism of the museum was expressed in 8% of the comments, often pairing concerns with overall support for the institution. For example, “Beautiful memorial depicting the resistance movement. There should also be an introduction to the displays.” Likewise, many of these critical comments concerned refinements to the exhibitions—adding elements of the story from regional areas, asking for the mention of a specific person, suggesting the use of multimedia, or citing the need for better maintenance.
Overall, the comments indicate that the museum’s expressed goal of instilling a vague lesson of “never again” was widely echoed by visitors. Learning does appear to take place and empathy is sparked. But precisely what was learned, how deep the lessons go and how visitors relate these questions to their present, past, or future, is less clear. Perhaps unsurprisingly, visitors appear to refract the experience of the tour through their pre-existing prisms for making meaning.
Most comments included multiple references, suggesting that visitors endeavored to find a place for the tour experience across their inventory of lenses that determine meaning. None of them prevailed. A single comment might draw on, for instance, several categories: religious, national, historical, or emotional response. Thus, individual comments form a snapshot: illustrating a process whereby the violent history portrayed in the tour unsettles the visitors, and they fail to place it solidly within a single category. Instead, the tour seems to provoke questions about how to categorize the past. Thus, while the visit resonates, it does not do so in a unified direction nor does it do so in relation to the museum experience alone.
In short, the intentions behind the memorial space only vaguely reflect a lesson of “never again”; but how this is interpreted within a socio-political context is highly dependent on what a visitor brings to the visit. Memorial intentions undoubtedly resonate, but do not encompass the experience. Those who created the museum and who guide visitors through its exhibition can set the tone, selecting the design, objects, photographs, and narrative. Visitors are often willing to follow the narrative path laid out before them, but as they consider where that path leads beyond the museum experience, memorial intentions begin to slip. Viewed from position of the object, even one as extraordinary as human remains, a museum visitor is someone who takes up the continuing work of reframing and redefining what the meaning of memorialization is.
Conclusion: Slipping on objects
Efforts to theorize the socio-political significance of memorial endeavors have largely approached the question of the meaning of memorializing past atrocities in terms of who determines or influences public narratives about which pasts matter and how. The processes through which various actors assert agency are described as contested, instrumentalized, or potentially transformative. Hidden beneath these descriptors of socio-political meaning of memorialization is the presumption that intentions are the primary element in determining what lessons will be learned from memorial endeavors.
In memorial contexts, human remains play exceptional roles. They set into motion an array of activities and investments of meaning that do not always function in harmony. Bones can reference an individual person who once existed, evidence of a crime, metonym for a lost people, an aesthetic form, an ethical obligation (familial, religious, or otherwise articulated), or a symbol for the innate similarities between humans reduced to the most elemental residue (Dzuiban, 2017). They can also be instrumentalized for state purpose—condemning a former regime and (or) propping up a new one, whether intent on democratizing or newly concentrating power. And, they are objects that collect dust and require conservation.
A genealogy of memorial objects provides lessons not in how memorialization produces any particular socio-political lessons, but rather in the slippage of meaning as intentions fail to circumscribe the process of making sense of past violence. Objects get stuck, shift gears, re-arrange flows, or can be moved along by other forces; all without losing their presence. While much of theorization of memory focuses on how objects capture memorial meaning, this essay has focused on the opposite. Objects interrupt the process of finalizing the memorial lessons, regardless of who wants to assert or control the memorialization process. The challenge for analysts is not to discern whether atrocity memory contributes to any one political tendency, be it democratizing, identitarian, or authoritarian. Rather, the key problematic is to map the constellation of forces at play in producing meaning at a particular moment in time—not only in how these forces might succeed, but also how they fail.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank two anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft. She also wishes to thank her colleagues from the International Panel on Exiting Violence (IPEV), in the working group on history and memory. Led by Scott Straus, with the authors, Baskara T. Wardaya, Catherine L. Besteman, Francisco Ferrandiz, Molly Minden, Natan Sznaider, and Ronald G. Suny, the working group discussions provided a rich context in which to explore questions of memory and violence, and informed this essay’s approach to memory. The group’s collective paper, “The uses and abuses of memory,” is part of the final IPEV Report, available on the Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme’s website at: 
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
Author interviews
Ayene “Nunu” Tsige, 13 November 2016.
Ayene “Nunu” Tsige, 19 August 2017.